While preparing for The Waste Land, Mr Honk observed
the future custodians sailing their four wheels in a downpour
and wondered if the previous inhabitant of his study
also echoed Dryden’s grumbling about the wanton boys
with their ‘I’ll tell yer wot ‘e is, I’ll tell yer strite’—
a façon de parler that’s enthralling to the point it hurts.
But as an incorporeal entity—with his abandoned language
of an estranged homeland—who was he to complain?
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An inherited maisonette with a desk
and a somewhat belittled yet elaborate vocabulary
set the stage for Mr Honk to start a new life.
He never met that distant relative,
whose title turned out to be a misreading
of the initials of his first and middle names,
from the time when he refused to use capital letters—
but Mr Honk learnt that only from the headstone:
Meroz R. Nothing, né niczy.
No wonder Mr Nothing had never cried
out for an act of sincerity
and grief.
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With a nameplate on his door
and a stanza in his wallet,
Mr Honk stumbled upon
the first smidgeon of perpetuity,
but as a newborn he looked back
at the five decades of his life
with a hint of reservation—
fate might have spared him
the habitual thumb-munching
but not the descriptive grammar:
You ain’t lived nothing yet!
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Part hermit, part monk, Mr Honk—
courtesy of Mr Wallace—
wondered at what subordinate clause
his sentence would abruptly end,
even if he was not quite sure
whether he was writing a field report
or an epigraph.
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Mr Honk has been born out of necessity,
as no one knew how to pronounce his real name
or if he even had one; after all, he often struck people
as a rather peculiar figure—an elderly bairn
who always wanted to write long and amicable letters
but didn’t foresee that he would become the sole addressee.
But he came to terms with that just as he did with the fact
that some books were taking him longer, though he never knew
if it was the extent, the typeface and kerning,
or simply the purport.
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The left-handed fascinate me—
I call them the mirror folk—
but I’m still not sure if their otherness is real
or just perceived, like my reflection
blurred by gauche epigraphs
and recherché humility.
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I bit a tomato—
courtesy of the Columbian exchange—
as if it were a Belle de Boskoop
while staring at the map of the patch across the pond,
wondering what shaped the Usonian Goldilocks syndrome,
because when you split a hair, you reveal its structure;
when you spin it, you can make it look prettier,
but you will never go beyond cosmetics.
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I live by the river yet never walk its banks.
Not that they’d miss me particularly—
after all, I would just be another pair of soles
trampling on their peace between the tides.
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Baking bread is all about temperature—
set it too low and you’ll end up with a dry brick,
but too high and the crust will burn,
leaving the dough uncooked inside.
But you’ve got to be at least thermo-literate
to land a baker’s job, and that’s a fact, not an opinion—
you still remember what that is, don’t you?
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hidden pilcrow 